Tag: Stress

Objective knowledge is a myth; all “knowledge” being based on biases in “perception” and “cognition” is subjective and emotionally determined.

There is no such thing as a fact. Any verbal statement is an opinion. Any statement can be called an opinion or a fact and if called an opinion, it leaves the possibility of an error. If called a fact, neurotically expressing a belief that the statement is gold-plated, it is never to be questioned. More importantly the mind is turned off that fact (not questioning).

There are only two emotions, like and dislike – all others are components of one of these plus a personally formulated comment about “reality”. For example, lonely means “I am alone” and “I don’t like being alone”.

Anger and depression are not separate emotions. Anger, reality as I perceive it, does not match my image of how it ought to be, but I think there is something I can do about it. Depression is the same, but I think there is nothing I can do about it.

Negative emotions are associated with unnecessary disturbances of bodily mechanisms, proportional to the duration and intensity of the negative emotional state. Such reactions are not limited to a particular organ. All bodily organs and cells express their response to such brain states in various ways. If you are angry or depressed about your job, your stomach acids will either go up or down, your blood pressure will go up or down, your glands will increase or decrease their functioning, and so on.

Consider the concept of “stress”. There are two reactions. If the stress makes you miserable, your body will have all kinds of deleterious reactions. If it is enjoyable, your body will function better than ever, up to the limits of the body’s installations.

Learn to quickly identify the onset of anger and depressive feelings in yourself.

Pick something you don’t want to happen to you, such as a removal of an organ for instance, and when something happens that would normally make you angry or unhappy, ask whether giving in to these negative feelings is worth the disease price you’ll have to pay.

Discontinue any medications that are central nervous system depressants.

Use alcohol in trivial amounts as it is the worst brain depressant.

Start observing other people: their postures, their choice of words, tones of voice, pitch and levels of stress. Study the reactions of others and try to guess what is going on in their heads. And then watch yourself. Shoulder posture – down and forward is depressed, up and forward is hostile whereas up and back gives you a feeling that you are working towards the control of your own reality.

Decide each morning that throughout the day, whatever happens, it will not make you as angry or as unhappy as it would have the day before.

Get rid of the words “got to”, “have to”, “should”, “must”, “ought to” and “will power”. You can’t do anything except what you want to do – so enjoy it.

Notes from The Medium Is The Massage (sic) by Marshall McLuhan

The personal and social consequences of any medium i.e. of any extension of ourselves, result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each technology or extension of ourselves.

Automation technology is integral and decentralised in depth. The machine was fragmentary, centralist and superficial in it’s patterning of human relationships.

Medium is the message because medium shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.

The medium is the message and one should not be distracted by the content.

Notes on writing by author Georges Simenon and advice by editor Colette

Colette’s advice to Simenon: “It almost works. But not quite. You are too literary. You must not be literary. Suppress all the literature and it will work…”

Simenon makes the habits and idiosyncrasies of his characters so known to the reader that each and every reader emotionally equates the character with the person of his most intimate acquaintance, himself. Similarly, localities realised in such exact and penetrating detail can be treated by the reader’s emotions only as the one locality we have all apprehended in truly vivid detail, the setting of our childhood.

All his life, Simenon has not just observed but simulated man and woman: their loves, deliriums, obsessions, the secret hiding places of their mind, their urge towards self-realisation or self-destruction. Above all, he’s imagined and lived through the character’s loneliness.

If there is to be any art, if there is to be any aesthetic doing and seeing, one physiological condition is indispensable – frenzy. It must first have enhanced the excitability of the whole machine, or else there is no art. All kinds of frenzy, however diversely conditioned, have the strength to accomplish this, but above all, the frenzy of sexual excitement – this most ancient and original form of frenzy.

How to make pizza

Make a big batch of pizza dough and prepare the pizza bases to rise in a warm place.

Make the sauce for the base: fry chopped onion and garlic in olive oil, add tomato puree, add chopped oregano and basil, and salt and pepper to taste.

Top bases with pizza sauce and your favourite flavours:

Mince, as in bolognaise sauce

Bacon and cheese, fry chopped bacon and spread on base with thin slices of mozzarella

Kabana, sliced thinly, pan fried then spread thickly over base with pizza sauce on top